Facebook Making iPhone App Faster

Published June 28, 2012•Updated on June 28, 2012 at 1:23 pm

Facebook is making its iOS application faster after complaints that its app is glacially slow.

Unnamed Facebook engineers told the New York Times that they are rebuilding its iOS app to optimize speed and it will be released next month.

Although Facebook declined to comment, the unnamed engineers continued to sing like canaries. The new app will be built using Objective-C, the same programming language used to create iOS apps unlike the current version which was built with HTML5. It's currently being tested and will be available this summer.

Applications that are predominantly HTML5 render most of the components of an app as a Web page, pulling images and content from the Web directly into the application. Objective-C takes the opposite approach, taking full advantage of the hardware in the iPhone and then building most of the functionality directly into the application so it has to collect less information from the Web.

The new app will be much faster, but it will still be the same lackluster blue-and-white design we've seen for years. Still, if we had to choose between design or speed -- we would like a faster app.